To understand how he created this intricate instrument, we first need to understand how singing glasses work. If you rub your finger around the rim of a glass, the friction causes the glass to vibrate and create sound waves. In fact, every instrument vibrates in some way to create sound. The wonderful thing about the singing glass is that it vibrates for some time after you stop playing it, meaning it has a long decay time, which is that beautiful haunting ringing sound.
But why are the glasses filled with water? Well, we hear faster sound waves as higher sound and slower sound waves as lower sound. The size of each glass defines how fast or slow these vibrations move through it and, therefore the pitch. When you add water to the glass, you add more material for the vibrations to travel through, therefore slowing the vibrations down and making the pitch lower.
Instead of filling each glass with water, Franklin worked with a glassblower in London to make different sized bowls that vibrate at various pitches used in Western scales. These bowls were then fitted inside the next with cork, colour coded to represent different notes and held together with an iron rod that ran through their centre. This was then attached to a wheel, which was turned manually by a foot pedal. To play it, a musician would dip their fingers in water and touch each bowl’s edge as it turns, producing a sound much like the singing glasses. However, this time you could play more quickly, with more dynamic ability with up to 10 notes at once - an impossible feat on the singing glasses. Plus, once it was made, it never needed to be tuned! Taking its name from the Greek word for harmony, the Glass Armonica was born.
Franklin cherished his invention. He took it with him when he travelled across the world, playing his own compositions or his favourite Scottish tunes to audiences across Europe and the U.S. And, it wouldn’t be long before composers such as Beethoven and Mozart began writing music for it. The glass armonica became one of the most celebrated instruments of the 1700s, it seemed destined for a place in history. But by the 1830s, it was nearly forgotten. What happened?
In the late 1700s, some unsettling incidents began to be associated with the Glass Armonica. Rumour had it that Armonica players became both physically and mentally ill - many complaining of muscle spasms, nervousness, fainting, cramps, dizziness, hysteria and melancholia. And, It wasn’t just the players that were rumoured to fall victim to it. After a child died during a performance in Germany, the armonica was banned in a few towns. Some people even thought that the tones were magical, invoking the spirits of the dead and driving listeners mad. So is this beautiful instrument actually the sound of insanity?
One theory is that musicians were actually coming down with lead poisoning from the lead glass bowls or paint used to colour code each note. However, although lead poisoning was common in the 18th and 19th century, there seems to be little scientific backing for this theory. The lead used in the Armonicas construction would be much less than other sources of lead in 18th century day to day life, such as makeup.
It also seems there is no actual evidence for people being driven mad at an unusual rate. Perhaps this rumour started because of a fascinating musical quirk that deceives and disorientates the brain and leaves us unsure of the location of the Armonicas sound. Before I start this section I want to give a little caveat, the way that humans locate sound is really complicated and it has constantly changing science, I’ve simplified it a lot here and if you are watching next it might be out of date. However, it is generally thought that we locate sounds by recognising the difference in the time it takes for a sound to reach one ear and then the other ear - the phase difference. As the frequencies get higher and the phase difference becomes less, it becomes more and more difficult for our brain to process, and at about 1kHz it becomes much harder for us to locate sounds using this method. When the sound gets higher (4khz and above), the brain changes tac and uses the difference in the volume of a sound between both ears. So, there is a gap between 1 and 4 kHz, this is the range where most of the pitches of the Glass Armonica fall. Our brains are never quite sure where or what the sound is coming from. It’s probably why people often describe it as ethereal. Our brains can’t effectively process what we’re hearing, so it literally feels otherworldly and perhaps a little disconcerting.This is probably why people thought they could be going mad listening to it.
The idea that the music was coming from somewhere other than the orchestra also informed the use of the Glass Armonica in Opera. In Die Frau Ohne Schatten (The Woman Without A Shadow) by Richard Strauss, the instrument is used to represent the eerie voices of unborn children, further adding to its creepy reputation.
Franklin himself ignored the controversy and continued to play the instrument until the end of his life with none of the rumoured symptoms. However, the armonicas popularity never returned, perhaps also due to its inability to produce loud enough tones for new bigger concert halls, it’s expense and proneness to breakage.
Despite the rumours, I think the armonica is beautiful, albeit a little trippy, and it is undergoing a small revival. Recent productions of Opera’s like Lucia di Lammermoor, which dropped the use of the armonica and rearranged it for flute in the 1800s have brought back this magical instrument in “the mad scene” - of course.
But it’s not just the armonica that is wonderful, intriguing and has a colourful and complex history. Before we end this video, I want to leave you with a lovely fact about it’s inventor - Benjamin Franklin. Although more than 5000 glass armonicas were made before his death, he did not receive a single penny for its invention. In fact, he was a man who refused to patent any of his inventions, saying:
“As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.”
- that generosity seems a pretty nice note to end on!
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References
How do Glass Cups Make Sound?: https://sciencing.com/glass-cups-make-ringing-noise-6581.html
Science of Glass Cups: https://learning-center.homesciencetools.com/article/simple-water-glass-xylophone/
Glass Armonica: http://johnroach.net/the-evils-of-the-glass-armonica/
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/oct/26/glass-harmonica
Glass Armonica in Opera: http://www.operavivra.com/blog/glass-harmonicas-opera/
Most of us know Benjamin Franklin as a politician, writer, scientist and one of America’s founding fathers. He is lesser known for his musical achievements - a skilled player of the viola da gamba, guitar and harp, he was also the inventor of allegedly, the world’s most dangerous instrument - the glass armonica. But what is it? How does it work? And can an instrument really be dangerous?
In the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin was an American diplomat working between London and Paris. During this period, it was popular for musicians to perform the “singing” wine glasses - where a musical tone is produced by rubbing a wet finger around the rim of a glass. A friend of Franklin’s, Edward Delaval, was one of these musicians who had invented a set of glasses that were more precisely tuned and easier to play. After seeing Edward play them in May 1761, Franklin fell in love with the beauty of the sound. He decided he wanted to see if he could invent a single instrument that embodied this tone but made it possible to play chords and complex melodies.
